Signature Lecture Series

The Gender Institute hosts cutting edge scholars on gender and sexuality from across the U.S. and the globe. Often organized as thematic series, these lectures provide a rich opportunity for learning and discussion.

Spring 2025 Events

This event is a collaborative effort between the UB Critical Ecologies Research Collaborative, the Baldy Center, and the UB Gender Institute, and is co-sponsored by the Office of International Education and the Department of Geography.

Climate Change and Gender in the Global South

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Wednesday, February 26, 2025
3:00 - 4:30pm (ET)
509 O'Brian Hall

No Registration Required

Sarah Besky is Professor of the Anthropology of Work at the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. Her research uses ethnographic and historical methods to explore questions of labor, environment, and capitalism in the Himalayas and India. She is the author of The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India (University of California Press, 2014) and Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea (University of California Press, 2020). She also co-edited How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet (SAR Press, 2019) with Alex Blanchette. Sarah’s currently working on a new book on the long history of agrarian crisis in Kalimpong, West Bengal.

Andrea Marston is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her research examines the political economics and cultural politics of natural resources and energy systems, with a focus on raced and gendered injustices in Latin America. She is author of Subterranean Matters: Cooperative Mining and Resource Nationalism in Plurinational Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2024), which explores the embodied politics of small-scale tin mining on the Bolivian altiplano. She has also published articles in journals such as Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Environmental Humanities, Journal of Peasant Studies, and Environment and Planning A, among others. Her work has been supported by a Margaret FitzSimmons Early Career Award in Political Ecology, an ACLS Faculty Fellowship, an ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Scholarship, and a SSHRC Doctoral Scholarship. She is currently co-editor for the book series Critical Geographies of Latin America and the Caribbean (University of Florida Press).

Li Zhang is an assistant professor of sociology and environmental studies at Amherst College. She is the author of The Origins of COVID-19: China and Global Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2021) and Co-PI of a USDA-funded national-level study on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on US food supply chains. She uses ethnographic methods, surveys, and digital archives to examine food safety, security, sovereignty, gender, race/ethnicity, indigeneity, health and environmental justice, and climate change resilience and adaptation.

The Beyond Binaries Signature Lecture Series is co-sponsored by Office of Inclusive Excellence and the Department of Biological Sciences. 

Queering Global Flora: Plant Worlds and the Afterlives of Empire

with Banu Subramaniam, Luella LaMer Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College

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Thursday, April 17, 2025
509 O'Brian & via Zoom
3:30 - 5:00pm (ET)
Free and open to the public. 

How have histories of colonialism and their foundational language of gender, race, sexuality, and nation shaped the language, terminology, and theories of the modern plant sciences? How and why do botanical theories remain grounded in the violence of their colonial pasts? In wrestling with these difficult origins, I develop the concept of migrant ecologies to retheorize plant migration and reproductive biology. I explore new biological frameworks that harness the power of feminist thought in order to reimagine and reinvigorate our love of plants.

Banu Subramaniam is the Luella LaMer Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, Banu engages the feminist studies of science in the practices of experimental biology and is author of Botany of Empire (2024), Holy Science (2019) and Ghost Stories for Darwin (2016).

Fall 2024 Events

The Beyond Binaries Signature Lecture Series is co-sponsored by Office of Inclusive Excellence and the Department of Biological Sciences. 

Multivariate models of animal sex: Breaking binaries in biology

with Sara Lipshutz, Assistant Professor of Biology, Duke University

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Thursday, October 10, 2024
The Landmark Room, 210 Student Union & via Zoom
12:00 - 1:30pm (ET)
Free and open to the public. Lunch will be provided.

Cultural biases shape our predictions for how and why animals behave the way they do, and female animals have historically been neglected in biological research. We study female competition across diverse avian species, from underlying mechanisms to evolutionary consequences. Rather than emphasizing the binary of female vs. male phenotypes, we position our research in a framework of sex diversity and variation.

Dr. Sara Lipshutz is an Assistant Professor in Biology at Duke University. Her research group focuses on the evolution of behavior across weird and wonderfully diverse species of birds. This work bridges “muddy boots” experimental fieldwork with a variety of molecular and computational approaches in genetics, genomics, neuroscience, and endocrinology.